Happydog commented on a spam post (since deleted) where a multi-paragraph article on WWI was followed by a link to a Colorado law firm:

This is about the weirdest spam I’ve ever seen. I’m sure these lawyers have no idea the people they hired to get them traffic are idiots.

This type of spam is not about getting people to click on the links. It’s an attempt to associate the links with popular web sites. (Wordorigins.org is not especially heavily trafficked, but it gets a respectable number of readers each month.) The aim is to boost search engine ratings, not get click-throughs. In this case, the topic of WWI, undoubtedly cut from another site and pasted here, was probably chosen because of the recent thread on the term “world war.” It’s all automated; no humans involved.

Google has pretty good algorithms to discount this type of spam in its rankings. Other search engines probably don’t. I don’t know how effective the practice actually is, but I’m guessing that it does have an impact on the margins.

(Note: if you want to comment on spam, start a new thread in the meta discussion. If you comment on the spam thread itself, the comment will disappear when I delete the original spam post.)

I’m an internet marketer and keeping up with SEO practices is something I do every day. The biggest problem with spamming a forum like this with a link to a lawyer’s site is that it lacks relevance, something that Google values above almost everything else. In many respects, Google is far more sophisticated than people believe and when you post content about WWI in a domain like Wordorigins and then link it to a site about lawyers, Google sees the total lack of relevance and it isn’t just that the link becomes worthless, it actually raises a flag and if you do that enough, Google will sandbox your site and you’ll find yourself de-indexed and then you’re sunk as far as getting any traffic from Google goes. It doesn’t matter that it’s automated spam, it’s still counter-productive and when you hurt your clients instead of helping them, you’re an idiot. It doesn’t matter if Yahoo recognizes and counts the back-link if you lower your standings in Google.

SEO is an ever changing landscape and when you try to manipulate your standings in Google, you had better know what you’re doing or you’re going to end up shooting yourself in the foot. Automated software worked for a while and plenty of people are still pushing it, but all of the top-level marketers have abandoned it because it just isn’t sophisticated enough to do you any real good anymore.

Click-through traffic is worthless in comparison to search engine traffic and anyone willing to risk their Google SERP rank for a few measly click-throughs is just plain ignorant.

Wordorigins is actually a pretty attractive target because even a new thread has a Google Page Rank of 1 and the home page is PR6 which is a very valuable link, indeed. But that is a double edged sword because a non-relevant PR1 link hurts you more than a non-relevant PR0 link. in other words, only someone completely ignorant about SEO best practices would spam a forum like this.